Monday, September 24, 2007

Paleo Diet

I'm intrigued by the Paleo Diet phenomenon (if it can be called that) -- I have this book, for example. But here's one thing that troubles me: One central message that you see, over and over, is that we humans are best off if we eat the same diet that we evolved to eat, that is, the diet that we would have had before the invention of agriculture a few thousand years ago. Thus, no grains, beans, dairy, sugar, or salt. Instead, just meat, eggs, vegetables, fruit, and nuts.

Now I agree, this is probably a very good way to eat. But is it a real "paleo" diet? Most discussion of this diet doesn't really deal with the fact that most humans lived in an era before refrigeration or good canning methods, and many humans also lived in climates that don't offer year-round fruits/vegetables.

So a real "paleo" diet (I'm just guessing here, but I think it's a good guess) would be more like this: fruits and vegetables when in season (for a few months out of the year), and then just wild game, fish, and maybe a few nuts for the rest of the year. Also occasionally go for a month without eating at all, just to simulate the effect of winter-time starvation when no wild game is available.

I have recently begun to follow the Paleo diet, because it completely makes sense to me. You cannot eat Grains the way you find them in nature, and the only way we could figure out how to use them is to heat them up to kill enough toxins to make them edible. This was great when we NEEDED a way to eat things like beans, grains and potatos because they wouldn't spoil. But now in the days of the fridge and the freezer, we don't need to eat these foods, as out fruits, veggies and Meats won't spoil as fast. Turns out that grains, potatoes and beans contain alot of Anti-Nutrients that our body cannot use. These take the nutrients out of our body, and then we poop them out, effectively wasting them.

The best way the Paleo Diet has been explained to me is only eat things that you can eat raw in nature. To clarify, this does not mean you have to eat them raw (And many times you shouldn't).